The Conservative government has sold its Candu nuclear reactor business to Montreal-based SNC-Lavalin for a paltry $15 million, effectively writing off tens of billions of dollars Canadians have invested in the Crown corporation over the past 60 years.

Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver announced the sale of Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd.'s (AECL) commercial division on Wednesday, saying it was the "best deal in a difficult domestic and international environment."

"Cost overruns have contributed to total funding requirements for the Candu reactor division of about $1.2 billion over the past five years," he said. "This cannot continue given our government's commitment to fiscal responsibility."

The government will retain ownership of Candu intellectual property, and SNC-Lavalin will pay royalties to the feds on new reactor sales, which it hopes to make in Ontario, Jordan, Romania, Argentina, Turkey and China.

AECL has been a Crown corporation since 1952, and estimates peg the total public investment at between $20- and $30-billion.

But the feds have been trying to sell the commercial division off for the past three years because the agency had failed to sell a new Candu reactor in decades and the feds had been covering for a series of costly overruns and delays in refurbishment projects.

AECL has posted losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars for the past few years.

"We will strive to make it a success both for the people who have built it, and for our shareholders," said Patrick Lamarre, SNC-Lavalin's vice-president of global power, in a news statement Wednesday.

"With our expertise and experience in the nuclear sector, we believe that Candu energy will allow us to open new markets and capitalize on existing ones."

The government is holding onto AECL's research division, including the Chalk River, Ont., reactor that is used to produce medical isotopes for heart and cancer diagnostic testing.

But AECL officials have said cleaning up the radioactive waste at the Chalk River site alone could cost $2.6 billion and take 300 years. Taxpayers are still on the hook to pay to clean it up.

About 1,200 AECL employees will transition to SNC-Lavalin. To date, 34 Candu reactors have been built in seven countries.